Entertainment

San Francisco Bay Bridge Becomes iPad Game [EXCLUSIVE]

For years, the mighty bridge that spans San Francisco Bay — one of the busiest bridges in the world — has been undergoing an increasingly expensive earthquake retrofit. As workers fix, replace and nudge it around piece by piece, motorists have struggled with untold hours of delay, one partial collapse, and a bridge that seems to be forever changing shape. The process won't be complete until 2013. But as of Tuesday, transit authorities have a new way to explain what's going on: a free iPad app that lets you drive over a constantly updated virtual version of the Bay Bridge.

The app, called Bay Bridge Explorer, is built on the solid foundations of a 3D videogame world. The developers used the Unreal Development Kit from Epic Games, the basis of dozens of bestselling games such as Unreal Tournament, BioShock and Deus Ex. Bay Bridge engineers contributed precise design specs, and the whole thing was knitted together by 3D design industry leader Autodesk — a company already intimately involved with the iPad.

Why release it now? Because the bridge is about to shape-shift again. In the wee hours of Memorial Day, traffic on the Oakland side will find itself going off in a slightly different direction. The state entity behind the bridge, Caltrans, knows from years of traffic data who tends to be crossing at that time. It's hip, tech-savvy youngsters who like to go clubbing and tend not to own a TV.

Telling these drivers about the changes via traditional media, now and in the future, is a non-starter. But a free iPad app? That should do the trick.

Bay Bridge Explorer is an eerily accurate recreation of the bridge on a sunny San Francisco day. You can drive the world-famous bridge in either direction, tilting to steer and tapping to accelerate. The app lets you go 10 mph over the official bridge speed limit, dodging traffic at a breakneck 60 mph. And the designers have built in a few Easter eggs, too. "Many people want to crash just to see what it does," says Doug Eberhard, Senior Director at Autodesk. "It's fun to go off and see what else is there."

We've heard a lot about gamification in recent years, but it usually refers to the act of adding points and rewards to real world activities, a la Foursquare. Here we have a whole different kind of gamification — a government body communicating up-to-the-minute changes in infrastructure, wordlessly, in a 3D virtual realm. The app will be updated right up until the completion of the project two years hence; indeed, the home screen lets you test out different versions of the bridge and bears a couple of mysterious "coming soon" slots.

Here's hoping it won't be long before the app lets us drive over the mysterious new eastern span springing up alongside the current bridge — something every Bay Area motorist has seen, but none have yet driven.

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